NEW YORK (Diya TV) — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, renowned literary theory and postcolonial scholar, has received the 2025 Holberg Prize, a highly regarded international award for excellence in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology.
Spivak, now a University Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, is celebrated for her groundbreaking scholarship in critical theory, feminism, and translation studies. Her foundational 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” challenged dominant intellectual paradigms by foregrounding the structural silencing of marginalized subjects, specifically subaltern women. This essay has become central to postcolonial scholarship, urging scholars to question power relations and exclusion.
Born in Kolkata, India, Spivak started her academic career at the University of Calcutta before obtaining her doctorate from Cornell University. She has remained close to Bengal, as evidenced by her translation of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi,” which brought global attention to the lives of tribal women in India. Outside of academia, Spivak has been dedicated to grassroots education, operating self-subsidized schools in some of India’s poorest areas.
The Holberg Prize committee praised Spivak’s wide-ranging influence as follows: “Spivak’s writing challenges readers, students, and scholars to ‘train the imagination’ through a sustained engagement with literature and culture. Taking the heart of Western thought as a critical object, she has made possible, enabled, and supported otherwise unimaginable lines of critical questioning—both at the centers and peripheries of global modernity.
With nine books published and her works translated into more than 20 languages, Spivak’s influence cuts across disciplines and continents. The Holberg Prize, which comes with a cash award of around $540,000, will be awarded to her on June 5 at the University of Bergen in Norway.
